Wash A Dish In Your Hotel Room Hassle-Free With Samantha Brown's Hack

You can ask hotels for all kinds of freebies, but one thing you're not likely to get is dish soap. If you're planning to stay in a hotel as compared to an Airbnb or Vrbo, it might be so you can enjoy the many conveniences that come with a traditional accommodation, like ordering room service and not worrying about cleaning up. But you might discover that you still need to wash a dish on your travels, and Samantha Brown, Travel Channel show host, has a hack that will let you wash a dish with minimal mess and stress, and just a bit of pre-planning.

Brown posted a video on Instagram showing the hotel dish-washing strategy, which it looks like she got from a former flight attendant. It starts at home by soaking a sponge in liquid dish soap. Leave it to dry, and then cut it up. Then, you take those small pieces of sponge and pop them into a container and take it with you on your trip. When you need to wash something, pull out one of the sponge pieces, run it under water and clean away. No hassle of taking a travel-size bottle of dish soap with you, nor the need to resort to using hand soap on your dishes (spoiler alert, it's not a great idea).

One of the commenters on Samantha Brown's Instagram video noted that instead of a plastic container, you could also store the pieces of sponge in a bag — add it to the reasons that you should always pack a Ziploc bag with you when you travel. Brown also noted in the comments that since the liquid soap has dried and been absorbed into the sponge, that it doesn't count as a liquid when you take it through TSA — score!

You might be wondering why you'd travel with dishes. If you're like Brown, you might prefer to bring your own tea or coffee cup. Plus, if you're trying to be eco-friendly, you may be on vacation with your own travel cup or reusable water bottle. And if you're traveling with the family, you may have sippy cups and baby bottles to deal with. Instead of having to bring a stack of cups for your kids or refilling your cup without cleaning it first (who wants to drink their coffee out of an unwashed mug?), now you can easily wash them out in the bathroom sink in your hotel room.